Desmond cocks his head to the side. “I brought you flowers, took you to a nice restaurant on a Friday night, just the two of us, and you think I’m the one who misread things?”
Okay, he has a point.
Desmond shakes his head, the corner of his mouth hitching into a half smile. “It’s okay. I should’ve been more clear. I just feel dumb for ironing my church pants.”
I chuckle, glad to have my friend back. “Yeah, what are you wearing?” I ask, my eyes darting to the khakis, then to trees outside the patio.
“My sister talked me into these.” He shakes his head at his slacks. He sighs. “I look like a schmuck, and you keep looking over my shoulder like you wish you were with someone else.” He turns, tracking my gaze. “Who’s back there?”
“No one.” I bite my lip. “Just the trees.”
He nods, and crickets chirp in the pause that follows. That’s one perk of sitting on this fancy patio, I guess. It’s like we’re in the trees.
Desmond stabs another ravioli, bites off the corner, and blows into the hole to cool the insides. He takes a tentative bite. “You want to be out there, don’t you?” he asks around his food.
My nose scrunches at Desmond’s uncouth food-cooling ritual, then scrunches again as he chews. I should record this and send it to his sister so she can give him feedback. What did he ask? Do I want to be out there?
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh, thinking of how the woods smell when the sun is going down. I’ll never get over Maine in the summer. It has my full heart. “Always.”
My friends all know that once school is out, and when I’m not working my side job at Marlow’s Diner, I am outside. When I became a high school choir teacher, I weighed the lowpay against the mostly free summers and chose accordingly. I can live with always needing a roommate, in my tiny house with crappy yellow laminate countertops, if it means I can be outdoors all summer.
Desmond bites a hole in another ravioli and repeats the process. “Well, sorry about this weird non-date.” He chuckles. “But on the bright side, I don’t have to watch my manners now.”
Then, unbelievably, his manners get worse.
An hour later, after both of our mouths are burned and our stomachs are full, Desmond drops me off in my driveway. It’s not dark yet—bless these long summer days—and I need to shake off the feeling that I went on a date with my brother. I climb straight into my car and point it toward the woods.
A few minutes later, I park in a small lot in Biddeford Forest Preserve and pop my trunk. In an hour it’ll be dark, and the cloudy sky will make night fall even faster. At least I can shove my feet into my boots and walk around for a few minutes, though. I love this forest because it pushes right to the edge of the Maine coast. It's a perfect marriage of thick woods and rocky seashore. I’ll breathe some fresh air and hopefully forget my horrendous “date” with Desmond before the sky turns black.
If that doesn’t work, I’m considering hypnotherapy. Or maybe I can have Marlow hit me over the head with a big rock. A traumatic brain injury might be the price I have to pay to purge tonight from my memory.
I replace my strappy sandals with my hiking boots, tying their chunky red laces and spraying my bare arms and legs with insect repellent. Ah, DEET perfume. I already feel more like myself. I start down a familiar trail that I’ve walked dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times, singing softly as I go. One of the job hazards of teaching teenagers to sing for a living is that I always have music in my head, and it tends to come out of mymouth. I’ve barely made it a quarter of a mile when my phone rings in my pocket.
“Hey, Marlow,” I answer in a whisper—it feels wrong to barge into the woods and disturb the peace. “What’s up?” It’s like she knew I was picturing her giving me a concussion. She wants to jump on it before I change my mind.
“We want to know how your date went.” From the background noise, it sounds like she has me on speaker.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I step over a thick root, skimming my fingers against the bark of a big hemlock tree as I walk past.
“August, Diana, Ike, and me.” My other friends are bickering about something in the background.
“You guys are hanging out without me? What happened to all of your big plans tonight?” I whine under my breath. My friends have all paired off, and they keep forgetting to include me in their double dates.
“We thought you had a date. That’s what Desmond told everyone.” Marlow can’t quite keep the teasing out of her voice. “How did it go?”
“I can’t believe none of you told me that was a date,” I mutter.
I keep thinking of an old episode ofSeinfeld. I want to scream “Serenity now!” through the trees like Frank Costanza. Instead, I tip my face to the sky and take a long, deep breath through my nose and let the chipmunks sleep.
“I can’t believe you didn’t put two and two together.” My so-called friend snickers. “Didn’t he bring you flowers? Muffie said she saw him buying a bunch of daisies at the market.”
“Yes, he did!” Muffie Horowitz hollers from somewhere in the background. “I saw him!”
They must be at the diner, unless my friends invited the seventy-something town gossip on their group date. This alsomeans all of Cape Georgeana knows about my “date” with Desmond. Excellent.
And yeah. I guess the flowers were the first thing that clued me in. The khakis were the second thing. I pluck a leaf from a white oak tree, running it between my fingers and holding it up to my nose.
“So?” Marlow is losing patience. She knows the date had to be a disaster, given only one of us knew it was a date. She wants this juicy story.
